Impressions of TEDxGateway held on 30th Oct 2010 at ITC Grand Central Mumbai

I attended the Ted X Gateway event day before yesterday, and since then I have been mulling over whether I should write about it. You see, of late I have been trying to follow the dictum, "If you do not have anything nice to say/ write about something/someone, don't say it!" 

The results, however, have been fairly disheartening, as I have not written anything for some time now. Hence, making amends. 

The event wasn't bad as such, though I was decidedly underwhelmed by it. The culprit, I presume, as Lord Buddha pointed out centuries ago was expectations. This being my first experience of a live TED event as opposed to videos seen on the laptop hadn't set expectations right.

I was under the impression that the talks would be about interesting, original ideas that people would share that are going to affect the world, would help you in better understanding of the current world or/ and involve a learning that the listener carries away from the session. Something ideally that he could replicate. You know, the "Ideas worth spreading" bit. I presumed it would be different than say, the Oprah Winfrey show (nothing against that show). 

It was embarrassing to find speaker after speaker apologize to the audience about their presence on the podium, as they were not sure whether they had done enough in life, or had an interesting idea worth sharing (worth being the operative word). It is one thing when one is starting a talk with a little humility, it is another to know when self doubt is pervading everyone's minds. Even more embarrassing was the fact that a lot of speakers insisted on showing their credentials and sharing  their fame (and pictures with dignitaries), right in the middle of their talks instead of actually talking about the idea which supposedly led them there. 

Ideas were sometimes tragically sacrificed for rhetoric and drama. I particularly remember two incidents, the first of a picture of a polar bear apparently precariously balancing itself on a fast melting ice piece floating on water, and it was cited as a passionate cry towards environmentalism "How long do you  think that poor polar bear has to live? As soon as that ice melts!" Polar bears are excellent swimmers. One doesn't want to dilute the importance of such a noble and needed initiative, but such half baked knowledge of the issue on hand ends up doing just that. In another talk, a seemingly enterprising suggestion by the speaker was to try selling Fair and Lovely in Africa. This is good sms joke lingo, and perhaps even light hearted water cooler talk. I was shocked at the speaker being seemingly serious about it.

While it is a testimony to the hard work put in by the organizers and the team that the event was organized within a month, it was still dismaying to see that for an event of this magnitude, a list of the speakers and talking schedules was not provided to the audience, the videos to be played hadn't been tried before (a repeated attempt to play a .mov file with VLC media player, without having tried it out on the system before), no-one from the organizing team was assigned to handle the lights (despite a very late start to the event) such that even basic requests of dimming lights or switching them off took a lot of time. Agreed that these are small quibbles for an event that by and large ran smoothly, but in the end such omissions end up diverting attention from the well oiled machinery.

But then, I was told by friends that this TEDx session was much better than the previous one organized in the city. I did have a fun, engaging day. And hence, please consider this just as harmless nitpicking. I am just as likely to attend the next one as well.

An excellent write-up on the tech showings of the day by @paddychop at Tech2.0 covers one that I wanted to talk about, the low cost infant warmer. Another fascinating experience was shared by Srini Swaminathan about innovative ways of teaching that he has been using to teach young kids at Dharavi. @greenrains covers it at Some of them just know and follow the way,

Instead, I shall talk about two talks that I particularly enjoyed, one that I didn't, and one that I didn't get! (there were sixteen speakers!)

Satish Krishnamurthy (of finalmile.in) 's talk was on saving lives of trespassers on train tracks in Mumbai. The talk started with the damning statistics of deaths on train tracks every year (higher than deaths due to all fatal diseases put together). Railways and the state government have been taking measures to prevent such deaths, but they all have been coercive in nature, the idea being trying to stop people from crossing tracks. Walls have been erected, fines have been institutionalized, and awareness campaigns have been taken forward to deter people from crossing train tracks. None of it has been successful, principally because the target audience refuses to comply. Reasons were put forward, one of them being the close proximity of the train tracks to a large population of mumbai, also a sense of overconfidence in having seen older, more experienced trespassers cross tracks everyday. Mr. Krishnamurthy and his team counted, and extrapolated the number to almost 30,000 people crossing the tracks at just one point of crossing. Policing such huge numbers was not a possibility. Awareness affects opinion, but behavior comes from far sub-conscious urges.

With this idea, and a changed perspective of trying to stop people dying on the tracks instead of preventing them from crossing train tracks, they set on to a series of things to "break their overconfidence, instill fear in them". I have never heard those words used in a positive, saving lives, project, and that was enlightening to say the least. Attacking perceptions and subliminal memories using graphic posters of men being mowed down by trains at crossings, to painting yellow stripes on the track to help gauge a correct visual estimation of the train's speed (human beings are not able to gauge speeds of bigger objects moving at a higher speed vis-a-vis a smaller object. Panic usually ensues, and trespassers usually get caught on another track by a train they were not paying attention to), installing whistle boxes about 120 m from crossings to warn trespassers,  and changing the decades long practice of the train driver's one deep long horn after seeing people crossing the tracks to a staccato horn (as the human brain is most alert at the mid-silence point between two high musical notes, as opposed to one long note). 

Results have shown themselves very worthy of the efforts as deaths have come down by 60% on the tracks. 

Another talk that truly charged me up was by the City City Bang Bang man, Mr. Santosh Desai. His talk was on seemingly innocent language strategies that imply much more than just the words. He started by mentioning how in India, people tend to use hyperbole to describe normal situations. Like people do not visit India to discover India, but to discover themselves.

1. Stimulus Package: is a term often used by the government machinery to describe public money spent to bail out bankrupt companies or save sectors not performing well (to be noted that in all cases, the money is used to bail out experts who screwed up). The term has a very viagra like virility to it, as it is a stimulus package used to pump up the economy, as opposed to a term like subsidy leakage (often used for bailing out farmers who couldn't pay back their loans). Essentially both terms mean the same thing, and yet one implies a positive sentiment, while the other implies a shameful leakage of public money.
2. Green Shoots: was a term being bandied about in venture capitalist circles. Implying a sense of growth, a vulnerability, a sense of please do not judge the performance of this venture already. 
3. Ae ji, sunte ho! : is a term used as a proscription for the spouse in Indian households. This is a practice that continues till date, using words like unhein or mere woh even in the current advertisements showcasing the modern Indian woman. This is very interesting, as if a grand plan in which the indian wife should not use the name of the husband publicly. The wife for the son is often considered as acquisition for the family (Beta, bahu le aao), and India generally being a joint family system, an age old fear has been that the sultry lustful young bride would wean away the son from the family using her charms. A subliminal way of preventing this is making sure that marriages are kept role based, signifying and defining the new bride's part as a cog in the family wheel.
4. "I love you": is said with quotation marks intact, as in Maine ussey "I love you" bol diya or Aaj mera "Happy Birthday" hai.  It helps maintaining a distance from the emotions inherent, easier adapting "western influences" to an indian setting without accepting any responsibility. 
5. Slum: An effective way of impersonalizing human problems/ issues is to herd a set of them together and refer to them as a collective. Impersonalizing it, desensitizing aggregation. Hence, it allows the usage of a sentence like "The slum is an eyesore" without guilt or judgement.
6. The Empty Apology: Using words draining them of apparent meaning. Essentially meaning, "I am sorry you did not understand my point of view. I am sorry you are stupid" instead of an actual apology.
7. The 'Stay' Order: used to signify institutionalized stasis. Purposeful inaction. We have decided that we shall do nothing. 
8. Railing against 'Delhi Sultanate': On the face of it, the term is harmless. Sultanate is an urdu synonym for government and it is based out of Delhi. But by using the term "Delhi Sultanate" (for eg. by Narendra Modi), the speaker is dredging up cultural memory of cruel rulers managing the fate of a nation on their whims all the way from Delhi. A useful way of owning the enemy is by inventing a name for them, and then making them react to you.
9. 'Brand' India: is a conceptual land grab, an invented site owned by a class. A way of signifying that one doesn't have to do anything internally to better situations or issues, but essentially as a means to show off only the best parts of the country. (As an ex brand manager, and a person passionate about branding, I do not agree with the presumed definition of the word brand, but I understand that is the popular belief).
10. The Middle Class: The so called middle class in india, according to income distributions is neither the mean, the median or the mode of the indian society. If anything, it is the upper middle class. The term "middle class" is a representativeness firmly establishing it devoid of excesses hence making it worthy of rallying for the "middle" class cause. 

(I just read the entire post above and realized how ranty it has become. Just lost all motivation to write further. Let me just quickly get this done.)

The one talk that I didn't like was by Ms.Devita Saraf, who was beautifully dressed in her new look, no doubt a result of careful time and energy. Alas, if only she had spent half those resources on her talk and presentation. Shocking bad template, and content picked straight from numerous e-mail forwards over the past decade. I did not get one basic point, what in the entire talk was Ms. Saraf's idea. (Perhaps the team was content in the one brilliant idea, that of VU sponsoring the event.)

The one talk that I absolutely didn't get was by Mr. Anand Gandhi, his topic being "Is Enlightenment Googleable?" He has graciously put the contents up on his blog, perhaps you can find the point of it.

I repeat, the point of this post has been to get me to kick-start my rickety blog, and is just nitpicking for a day that essentially I enjoyed quite a lot.